With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), more customization is needed to ensure privacy-preserving and safe generation. We address this objective from two critical aspects: unlearning of sensitive information and robustness to jail-breaking attacks. We investigate various constrained optimization formulations that address both aspects in a \emph{unified manner}, by finding the smallest possible interventions on LLM weights that either make a given vocabulary set unreachable or embed the LLM with robustness to tailored attacks by shifting part of the weights to a \emph{safer} region. Beyond unifying two key properties, this approach contrasts with previous work in that it doesn't require an oracle classifier that is typically not available or represents a computational overhead. Surprisingly, we find that the simplest point-wise constraint-based intervention we propose leads to better performance than max-min interventions, while having a lower computational cost. Comparison against state-of-the-art defense methods demonstrates superior performance of the proposed approach.

Samples of brain signals collected by EEG sensors have inherent anti-correlations that are well modeled by negative edges in a finite graph. To differentiate epilepsy patients from healthy subjects using collected EEG signals, we build lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural nets by unrolling a spectral denoising algorithm for signals on a balanced signed graph -- graph with no cycles of odd number of negative edges. A balanced signed graph has well-defined frequencies that map to a corresponding positive graph via similarity transform of the graph Laplacian matrices. We implement an ideal low-pass filter efficiently on the mapped positive graph via Lanczos approximation, where the optimal cutoff frequency is learned from data. Given that two balanced signed graph denoisers learn posterior probabilities of two different signal classes during training, we evaluate their reconstruction errors for binary classification of EEG signals. Experiments show that our method achieves classification performance comparable to representative deep learning schemes, while employing dramatically fewer parameters.

Monitoring large language models' (LLMs) activations is an effective way to detect harmful requests before they lead to unsafe outputs. However, traditional safety monitors often require the same amount of compute for every query. This creates a trade-off: expensive monitors waste resources on easy inputs, while cheap ones risk missing subtle cases. We argue that safety monitors should be flexible-costs should rise only when inputs are difficult to assess, or when more compute is available. To achieve this, we introduce Truncated Polynomial Classifiers (TPCs), a natural extension of linear probes for dynamic activation monitoring. Our key insight is that polynomials can be trained and evaluated progressively, term-by-term. At test-time, one can early-stop for lightweight monitoring, or use more terms for stronger guardrails when needed. TPCs provide two modes of use. First, as a safety dial: by evaluating more terms, developers and regulators can "buy" stronger guardrails from the same model. Second, as an adaptive cascade: clear cases exit early after low-order checks, and higher-order guardrails are evaluated only for ambiguous inputs, reducing overall monitoring costs. On two large-scale safety datasets (WildGuardMix and Beaver-Tails), for 4 models with up to 30B parameters, we show that TPCs compete with or outperform MLP-based probe baselines of the same size, all the while being more interpretable than their black-box counterparts.

In recent years, detecting fake multimodal content on social media has drawn increasing attention. Two major forms of deception dominate: human-crafted misinformation (e.g., rumors and misleading posts) and AI-generated content produced by image synthesis models or vision-language models (VLMs). Although both share deceptive intent, they are typically studied in isolation. NLP research focuses on human-written misinformation, while the CV community targets AI-generated artifacts. As a result, existing models are often specialized for only one type of fake content. In real-world scenarios, however, the type of a multimodal post is usually unknown, limiting the effectiveness of such specialized systems. To bridge this gap, we construct the Omnibus Dataset for Multimodal News Deception (OmniFake), a comprehensive benchmark of 127K samples that integrates human-curated misinformation from existing resources with newly synthesized AI-generated examples. Based on this dataset, we propose Unified Multimodal Fake Content Detection (UMFDet), a framework designed to handle both forms of deception. UMFDet leverages a VLM backbone augmented with a Category-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Adapter to capture category-specific cues, and an attribution chain-of-thought mechanism that provides implicit reasoning guidance for locating salient deceptive signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMFDet achieves robust and consistent performance across both misinformation types, outperforming specialized baselines and offering a practical solution for real-world multimodal deception detection.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) strive to achieve a profound, human-like understanding of and interaction with the physical world, but often exhibit a shallow and incoherent integration when acquiring information (Perception) and conducting reasoning (Cognition). This disconnect leads to a spectrum of reasoning failures, with hallucination being the most prominent. Collectively, these issues expose a fundamental challenge: the ability to process pixels does not yet confer the ability to construct a coherent, credible internal world model. To systematically dissect and address this challenge, this survey introduces a novel and unified analytical framework: ``From Perception to Cognition." We deconstruct the complex process of vision-language interactive understanding into two interdependent layers: Perception, the foundational ability to accurately extract visual information and achieve fine-grained alignment with textual instructions; and Cognition, the higher-order capability for proactive, multi-step, goal-oriented reasoning built upon this perceptual foundation, the core of which is the formation of a dynamic observe-think-verify reasoning loop. Guided by this framework, this paper systematically analyzes the key bottlenecks of current MLLMs at both layers. It surveys the landscape of cutting-edge methods designed to address these challenges, spanning from techniques that enhance low-level visual representations to those that improve high-level reasoning paradigms. Furthermore, we review critical benchmarks and delineate future research directions. This survey aims to provide the research community with a clear, structured perspective for understanding the intrinsic limitations of current MLLMs and to illuminate the path toward building next-generation models capable of deep reasoning and a genuine understanding of the world.

Humans develop an understanding of intuitive physics through active interaction with the world. This approach is in stark contrast to current video models, such as Sora, which rely on passive observation and therefore struggle with grasping physical causality. This observation leads to our central hypothesis: authentic physical intuition of the world model must be grounded in extensive, causally rich interactions with the real world. To test this hypothesis, we present WoW, a 14-billion-parameter generative world model trained on 2 million robot interaction trajectories. Our findings reveal that the model's understanding of physics is a probabilistic distribution of plausible outcomes, leading to stochastic instabilities and physical hallucinations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this emergent capability can be actively constrained toward physical realism by SOPHIA, where vision-language model agents evaluate the DiT-generated output and guide its refinement by iteratively evolving the language instructions. In addition, a co-trained Inverse Dynamics Model translates these refined plans into executable robotic actions, thus closing the imagination-to-action loop. We establish WoWBench, a new benchmark focused on physical consistency and causal reasoning in video, where WoW achieves state-of-the-art performance in both human and autonomous evaluation, demonstrating strong ability in physical causality, collision dynamics, and object permanence. Our work provides systematic evidence that large-scale, real-world interaction is a cornerstone for developing physical intuition in AI. Models, data, and benchmarks will be open-sourced.

This research aims to explore the intersection of Large Language Models and confidence calibration in Entity Matching. To this end, we perform an empirical study to compare baseline RoBERTa confidences for an Entity Matching task against confidences that are calibrated using Temperature Scaling, Monte Carlo Dropout and Ensembles. We use the Abt-Buy, DBLP-ACM, iTunes-Amazon and Company datasets. The findings indicate that the proposed modified RoBERTa model exhibits a slight overconfidence, with Expected Calibration Error scores ranging from 0.0043 to 0.0552 across datasets. We find that this overconfidence can be mitigated using Temperature Scaling, reducing Expected Calibration Error scores by up to 23.83%.

This study examines the impact of Socratic Mind, a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) powered formative assessment tool that employs Socratic questioning to support student learning in a large, fully online undergraduate-level computing course. Employing a quasi-experimental, mixed-methods design, we investigated participants' engagement patterns, the influence of user experience on engagement, and impacts on both perceived and actual learning outcomes. Data were collected from the system logs, surveys on user experience and perceived engagement and learning gains, student reflections, and course performance data. Results indicated that participants consistently reported high levels of affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement, and these were strongly linked to positive user experiences and perceived learning outcomes. Quantitative analysis further revealed that students who engaged with the GenAI tool experienced significant gains in their quiz scores compared to those who did not, particularly benefiting students with lower baseline achievement. Additionally, thematic analysis of qualitative feedback revealed substantial perceived improvements in higher-order thinking skills, including problem solving, critical thinking, and self-reflection. Our findings highlight the promise of AI-mediated dialogue in fostering deeper engagement and higher-order cognitive skills. As higher education institutions expand GenAI integration in curriculum, this dialogic, GenAI powered assessment tool can offer a scalable strategy to promote students' meaningful learning outcomes.

We introduce SteeringSafety, a systematic framework for evaluating representation steering methods across seven safety perspectives spanning 17 datasets. While prior work highlights general capabilities of representation steering, we systematically explore safety perspectives including bias, harmfulness, hallucination, social behaviors, reasoning, epistemic integrity, and normative judgment. Our framework provides modularized building blocks for state-of-the-art steering methods, enabling unified implementation of DIM, ACE, CAA, PCA, and LAT with recent enhancements like conditional steering. Results on Gemma-2-2B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen-2.5-7B reveal that strong steering performance depends critically on pairing of method, model, and specific perspective. DIM shows consistent effectiveness, but all methods exhibit substantial entanglement: social behaviors show highest vulnerability (reaching degradation as high as 76%), jailbreaking often compromises normative judgment, and hallucination steering unpredictably shifts political views. Our findings underscore the critical need for holistic safety evaluations.

Instruction-based image editing has advanced rapidly, yet reliable and interpretable evaluation remains a bottleneck. Current protocols either (i) depend on paired reference images-resulting in limited coverage and inheriting biases from prior generative models-or (ii) rely solely on zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs), whose prompt-based assessments of instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality are often imprecise. To address this, we introduce EdiVal-Agent, an automated and fine-grained evaluation framework grounded in an object-centric perspective, designed to assess not only standard single-turn but also multi-turn instruction-based editing with precision. Given an input image, EdiVal-Agent first decomposes it into semantically meaningful objects, then synthesizes diverse, context-aware editing instructions while dynamically updating object pools across turns. These two stages enable two novel object-centric metrics tailored for multi-turn evaluation and one global metric of visual quality: (1) EdiVal-IF, which measures instruction following by combining open-vocabulary object detectors for symbolic checks with VLMs for semantic verification on detector-guided crops; (2) EdiVal-CC, which evaluates content consistency by calculating semantic similarity of unchanged objects and background using the evolving object pools; and (3) EdiVal-VQ, which quantifies changes in overall visual quality with human preference models. Instantiating this pipeline, we build EdiVal-Bench, a multi-turn editing benchmark covering 9 instruction types and 13 state-of-the-art editing models spanning in-context, flow-matching, and diffusion paradigms. We demonstrate that EdiVal-Agent can be used to identify existing failure modes, thereby informing the development of the next generation of editing models.